Socialist Victories Reshape Canadian Politics

TORONTO — Resounding protest votes have changed Canada`s political landscape by turning over leadership in the provinces of Saskatchewan and British Columbia to the socialist New Democratic Party.

By huge margins, voters elected NDP leader Roy Romanow on Monday to be premier of Saskatchewan just four days after NDP leader Mike Harcourt was elected premier of British Columbia.

They join Ontario`s NDP premier, Bob Rae, elected a year ago to head Canada`s largest and richest province, to form what amounts to a left-leaning bloc that now will control three of the nation`s 10 provinces and 52 percent of Canada`s 26 million people. A New Democratic Party government also governs the Yukon Territory.

Analysts see this fundamental realignment of Canadian politics as driven by the recession, by voter anger and cynicism over endless constitutional haggling to keep wayward Quebec from separating, and by the unpopularity of the conservative policies of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his provincial allies.

``We have three social democratic governments committed to working with the people,`` Rae told reporters Tuesday in Toronto, ``and we don`t think that the ideological binge that the Thatcherites and the Mulroneyites took us on in the 1980s is the way to go.``

However, the cautious Rae disputed the idea that a socialist alliance now will dominate Canadian politics, even though the New Democratic Party is in its strongest position ever.

``There`s a need for us to work with all the premiers,`` he said. ``I don`t see this as an exclusively one-party group. The notion that there would be some kind of an NDP bloc or an NDP veto is totally wrong.``

Nonetheless, Mulroney`s latest national unity plan to keep Quebec in the confederation needs approval of seven provinces representing more than 50 percent of Canada`s population, which would allow a united socialist front to shape more decisively the final package.

At a time when the formerly Communist governments of Eastern Europe and even the Soviet Union are moving toward free-market economies, New Democrats insist they are not moving against the grain of recent history.

``There`s no conflict,`` said Audrey McLaughlin, the leader of the federal New Democrats and its opposition bloc in Canada`s Parliament. ``There is no doubt that in Canada, the NDP would be much more akin to the social democratic parties of Scandinavia.``

``We are first and foremost democrats,`` McLaughlin said Tuesday in a telephone interview from her Ottawa office.

``Canada has a very strong social democratic strain,`` she added, pointing to the country`s publicly funded health-care system as an example.

McLaughlin said the New Democratic Party, founded in 1961, has its origins in the populist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a prairie movement that helped hard pressed Canadians during the Great Depression and was staunchly anti-Communist.

Until this week, the socialist party typically ran a distant third to Canada`s two mainstream political parties, the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals.

McLaughlin said recent NDP victories represent a ``clear signal by Canadians that they are fed up with the right-wing politics that the Conservatives in Saskatchewan and the Social Credit Party in British Columbia have put forth.``

In Saskatchewan, where low income and high debt have ravaged Canadian farmers, the New Democrats took 51 percent of the popular vote in Monday`s election, while the Conservatives won 26 percent and the Liberals 23 percent. With the socialists sweeping 55 of the 66 seats in the provincial Legislature, Romanow ousted a Mulroney ally, Premier Grant Devine, to end nine years of Conservative government in the prairie birthplace of Canadian socialism.

But Romanow, a lawyer and former Saskatchewan Cabinet minister, moved quickly to mend fences after the fractious campaign, expressing the hope that NDP leadership can end the ``politics of division.``

In British Columbia, where the conservative-minded Social Credit Party had governed for 16 years, most recently amid scandals and accusations of official misconduct, the New Democrats won 51 seats last Thursday in the 75-seat provincial Legislature. The Liberals won 17, the Social Credit candidates 7.

Mindful of the tremors sent through the business community by socialist victories, the NDP`s Harcourt, a former mayor of Vancouver, promised he would achieve his goals within a balanced budget.

He also announced plans to lead a tour of the Far East with stops in Tokyo and Hong Kong to assure business leaders that it will be business as usual in British Columbia.